Editor Rating: 7.8
The Iriver E100 is a complete Portable player with almost all the features it could get, including photo and video playback, both Windows and Mac compatibility, many audio file formats support, speakers and a microSD memory card slot.
Design & Construction
Unfortunately, the materials Iriver E100 is build of look cheap and of low quality, with a not-so-responsive clickpad and hard navigation. Considering E100’s low price, it has enough features and a satisfying quality, but is low on navigation and it lacks podcast support.
Iriver has a high reputation in the industry, with Iriver Clix being a really good player and has lived with such a powerful competitor - Apple. It’s advantage over the competitor is the low price of $109.99 for the 4GB version and $159.99 for the 8Gb one and it’s plenitude of features.
E100’s design isn’t the best of them all, but it does look good. But the problem is with the control pad, that’s built of cheap materials and doesn’t work as it is supposed to, with a difficult to press center button. Also, the other button are sometimes unresponsive and have some delays.
Functionality
The keys aren’t as usual and can be confusing, the upper button goes back and the down button forward, while we got used to use the left and right buttons for this. I would say this is it’s biggest issue and can prove really annoying.
Except it’s keys, the Iriver E100 seems designed well and it comes in a wide variety of colors - white, black, brown, sky blue and pink. It features a 2.5-inch 320×240 QVGA display, with a good resolution. On the sides are located the volume rocker, power button, hold switch, mic and the reset hole. On it’s bottom side it’s located the mini USB port used to transfer files and charge the device, along with two 3.5mm standard jacks, one microphone line-in and one headphones line-out. The microSD memory card slot is located on top of the device and the speakers on the back of it. The speakers do sound pretty well, but don’t expect at HiFi quality.
It’s software is pretty engaging, but you don’t have the option to customize the interface at all, unfortunately. Also they could have taken profit of the quality display and make some better colored menus, instead of the current gray and black ones, with a slice of red.
It does support a plenitude of file formats, including MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, ASF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, AVI, and WMV, features a text viewer, an FM radio with the ability to record the stream and autoscan.
Sound Quality
Sound quality doesn’t place it on top, but is at least decent and it does have some features to please any music genre fan, like a five band customizable equalizer, with nine presets, SRS WOW, A/B looping, shuffle and repeat modes, lyrics display, bookmarking and a fade-in feature that automatically increase the volume on a track start and decreases it on it’s end, to make the transition more pleasant.
Conclusion
The Iriver E100 is a mid-end player worth it’s price, i would say. With a battery lifetime of 25 hours for audio and 5 hours for video, a lot of features and decent sound quality, it is a good portable player.